[jmyeet]

I would say it's funny but really it's just true. Thunderbolt cables and a lot of other high bandwidth cables have chips in either end, which some people don't realize. And yes, these chips have to handle IO in the gigabit range. So these microcontrollers are a bit apples to oranges (just like my WCH570 vs 486 comparison, to be clear) but even with all those caveats, yes it's basically true.

And yeah, that's wild.

[____tom____]

Not an area I'm familiar with, but do the chips really handle up in the gigabit IO? I thought they just handle connection setup. I had thought the gigabytes were not processed at all by the chips. They just flow through the wires.

?

[dcrazy]

The chips in an active TB cable perform signal retiming. https://plugable.com/blogs/news/what-s-the-difference-betwee...

[____tom____]

That's cool. Thanks for the info

[fragmede]

"Cable" is loosely defined, but a cable with usb-c on one end and anything else (eg HDMI) on the other has to do some processing of the signal in order to do that.